At the same time they had the sense not to change the Vulcans, even though their makeup was very basic, because after 100 appearances, and Spock becoming the most iconic character in science fiction, that would've been a bad idea.
Spoilers Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner
- Thread starter Allyn Gibson
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Yeah, for me that's the problem. Each one has to be bigger than the previous one.
I do think there should be a finale. But the track record in DW hasn't been great. And overall, it's easier to set up a big season long arc/mystery than it is to pay it off. I guess they're just tough to write effectively.
But I think the perceived need to make them super epic also makes them more difficult.
For example, it's not a season finale, but I still think Caves of Androzani is the best all-time DW story for me. But there's no epic confrontation to save the universe involved. It's a great set of characters isolated on a muddy planet. Sure there's some larger political stuff involved but that's background and isn't going to affect the universe.
And, I thought Capaldi's final season was his best and that's where Moffat didn't have those sprawling convoluted storylines.
Bigger isn't always better in general . . . and for finales.
ETA: After typing this I saw your own comments about Androzani!
I've said this before, but if I was the showrunner, I'd find someway to make it so that the Master was actually the timeless child. It fits so much better. The experimentation drove them insane/evil.
Also, you would then have a regular Time Lord (the Doctor) against a super villain (Master). That's more dramatically pleasing than an invincible, super strong special Time Lord (Doctor) going against a relatively ordinary villain (Master), which is what we've got now.
It would also explain how the Master managed to survive well past his last natural regeneration!
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Especially since the Reality War has potentially wiped the slate clean entirely.
With reality shifted over a degree, in the grand scope of things, anything goes now.
I don’t think anyone minds when future humans in story x don’t seem quite like future humans in story y from thirty years ago.
Even ‘UNIT dating’ is a discussion, for some quite a big one, but by and large it’s not something so broken as to cause problems.
Bit when you tinker with the single constant of the show ie. The Doctor, it is going to cause problems going forwards.
It’s almost like having the Tardis not be a Police box because it’s Chameleon Circuit broke down in Totters Yard.
(Which was also messed with with the TC/Fugitive stuff and caused similar ructions)
As a show, Who can get away with a fairly loose approach, but the constant is always the Doctor, and there’s where you add to history, not rewrite it.
If you slip sideways into the other media, so much has been done to try and reconcile the various versions of Ace’s story, and the various bits of stuff that come about when different continuations vy for primacy as the definitive continuation after 89 that it’s almost a sub genre of its own. Tales from the Tardis even plays with that.
Thats because stories need a level of internal consistency, especially after they’ve been going a while.
But RTD2 likes to do stuff like throw REG into a Doctor montage and know it’s going to cause questions they never intend to answer.
Even ‘UNIT dating’ is a discussion, for some quite a big one, but by and large it’s not something so broken as to cause problems.
Bit when you tinker with the single constant of the show ie. The Doctor, it is going to cause problems going forwards.
It’s almost like having the Tardis not be a Police box because it’s Chameleon Circuit broke down in Totters Yard.
(Which was also messed with with the TC/Fugitive stuff and caused similar ructions)
As a show, Who can get away with a fairly loose approach, but the constant is always the Doctor, and there’s where you add to history, not rewrite it.
If you slip sideways into the other media, so much has been done to try and reconcile the various versions of Ace’s story, and the various bits of stuff that come about when different continuations vy for primacy as the definitive continuation after 89 that it’s almost a sub genre of its own. Tales from the Tardis even plays with that.
Thats because stories need a level of internal consistency, especially after they’ve been going a while.
But RTD2 likes to do stuff like throw REG into a Doctor montage and know it’s going to cause questions they never intend to answer.
It is what it is. I stopped watching Who during Capaldis run. It was not that good. From what I read and saw clips of, the next few seasons would not have been to my liking. The fact is some franchises just run way too long. Who and Star Trek are mostly stale to me now. I have watched new Trek and like a small amount of it but for the most part it's not been very good or memorable for me. Doctor who is closing in on 1000 hours of content. That's a lot. I suggest to people to just watch your favorite seasons and doctors and leave it at that. Most of us are at an age where we won't ever watch the series from episode one all the way to present. Time is no longer on our side. Same with Trek. Just counting live action it's over 800 hours.
One of my all time favorite scifi shows is Farscape. It wasn't ran into the ground. I would like to see at least one reunion mini series but overall I'm good with how that show all turned out from start to finish. With the exception of two episodes I loved them all. 90 episodes and it never spinoffs, cast changes etc. It's highly rewatchable for me.
Star Trek and Who's heydays are long behind them. They are not coming back. No matter what is churned out at this point.
One of my all time favorite scifi shows is Farscape. It wasn't ran into the ground. I would like to see at least one reunion mini series but overall I'm good with how that show all turned out from start to finish. With the exception of two episodes I loved them all. 90 episodes and it never spinoffs, cast changes etc. It's highly rewatchable for me.
Star Trek and Who's heydays are long behind them. They are not coming back. No matter what is churned out at this point.
Since this is probably the closest thing to a general discussion thread we have in this forum, I figure I'd take the opportunity to acknowledge today (January 20) is Tom Baker's birthday. He is now 92 years young.
The differences between Davies's and Moffat's understanding of the Doctor and the show don't always get a lot of discussion. Davies didn't show the Time War, but his Doctors talked about the Nightmare Child and the Could've Been King and other strange, wondrous things we could only try to imagine. Moffat showed explosions and people running around with guns, a much simpler and less creative take on the war. Davies liked a bit of soap opera/kitchen sink drama feel (he was a former Coronation Street writer, after all). Moffat wanted a fairy tale vibe, and yet Moffat's take on the war and the Doctor's past life tended more to the ordinary and conventional than RTD1's take.
Trek is whole *slightly* different discussion. My summing up of it would be that Trek is a period piece, but instead of real history, it’s a made up future history. Once you start getting certain period details ‘wrong’ it’s in danger of losing itself of its existing audience.
(It’s quite a rare thing. BladeRunner 2049 was a good example of a story recognising that kind of fiction, and Alien Romulus too to a certain extent. Basically Trek is in many ways a precursor to what we now call RetroFuturism. We just didn’t recognise it at the time, because we hadn’t really started impinging on that future history until basically Voyager and DS9.)
Who is more like a soap opera, but instead of changing characters in a location, you change locations around a character. Just as some Soap Operas will always keep their pub, so Who must always keep the Time Lord and the Blue Box. The great thing is, regeneration means you can keep it going… well, forever, barring accidents.
For an example of a show that brought about its end by not recognising this, the kids show Grange Hill up and relocated to a different city for its setting, whilst pretending it hadn’t. It was very noticeable, and not much of a surprise what *could* and *had been* an essentially evergreen Soap/Drama was cancelled within a very short time frame. (It was ironically one of the series original creators making a return and moving both its production locale and in a *really* weird way, it’s setting, that did this.)
In both cases, whilst the formula is actually very open, there are limits — especially when the value in long running thing is their history. If a creative wants to throw that out, then they aren’t actually wanting to work on that story, they want the existing audience and reputation as leverage to get something else in front of more eyes.
The only aspect of the political that I will touch on this time is this — at some point this idea of using a well regarded media property as a messaging platform has lead to the strange idea that roles like The Doctor or James Bond are like political figures. That just as it is right to finally have a woman as a Prime Minister, or simply someone who isn’t White (Labour will get there one day. Maybe.) it’s also the case that groups *must* get a turn at being these popular figures. Not by making a new character and growing its audience, but by supplanting the existing one and hoping you keep the audience.
I am not sure this works. It can. But it can’t be…. done clumsily. Or done in a way that it looks like thats the only reason for doing it. Some characters have more fluidity built in, particularly The Doctor. (I would have preferred Paterson Joseph over Tennant, annd even over Ecclestone at first, and have long thought Adrian Lester is the best modern Doctor we never got for instance.)
The problem as ever is apparent motivation and clumsy execution.
A desire to take away, rather than finding the way to simply add.
It is ironic that the Master is mostly better handled than the Doctor in that regard, but maybe they got lucky with casting, or maybe *that character* has even more fluidity than The Doctor luckily patched in over the years. He remains the only one to ever regenerate into an American after all.
Edit: and just to follow up on that idea, I think it would have interesting, useful, and possibly even actually powerful to have the 13th Doctor experiencing a degree of dysmorphia — thousands of years as a man, suddenly a woman, a radically different biology with different needs, and quite possibly a sense of being reborn in the ‘wrong’ body was an opportunity for useful allegory and exploration. Admittedly, it also may be too much for a family show — but at least it would have made organic narrative sense, and may not have been as hamfisted as the awareness leaflet derogatory stuff RTD then did with the Second Coming of Tennant. Ooh er missus. And better than all the ‘had an upgrade’ gags we did get.
Doing ‘something’ because you’ve decided ‘something must be done’ with no thought into it is worse than doing nothing at all.
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I think this is the one instance where I prefer Davies over Moffat. Considering how Davies' writing was often bombastic, it's surprising how in this case he took the more subtle approach and left the Time War to our imaginations. I agree with him wherever he said (interviews, The Writer's Tale, etc.) that the Time War cannot possibly be depicted in a realistic manner, no matter the medium. Both Moffat and Big Finish proved that he's right about that.
I am ok with Moffat’s depiction.
We only saw the very last day of it, when the Time Lords explicitly had exhausted their vaults of more fantastical defenses.
They had nothing left, with the exception of the Moment, which sent the Doctor on a self enlightenment journey with two of his future selfs to end the war.
Everything else at that point was just conventional brute force with the Daleks swarming Gallifrey.
We only saw the very last day of it, when the Time Lords explicitly had exhausted their vaults of more fantastical defenses.
They had nothing left, with the exception of the Moment, which sent the Doctor on a self enlightenment journey with two of his future selfs to end the war.
Everything else at that point was just conventional brute force with the Daleks swarming Gallifrey.
Its why I am not really aknowledging the War Doctor audios beyond the John Hurt ones (because of the novelty, obviously). Nothing against the recast guy (he's really good from what I've heard of him) but the Time War setting is banal, and surpsingly I think considering on audio you could actually go all out in a weird way - think Scherzo but Time War, that'd be awesome!
Yeah, Moffat and most of BF's writers think in terms of an almost conventional war between time-active forces, where Davies suggests a war where time itself is used as a weapon. Kind of hard to actually depict that, of course, but was it really necessary to try?
I think Moff used it surprisingly sparingly — about the same as Dalton Rassilon in RTD1 at least in how it was presented — and with a singular purpose, which was to reset the status quo and put the toys back into order a little. Over his tenure he returned the Doctor slowly to essentially asexual, but without negating what had been done before, he slowly took the Doctor away from being a demigod and the final authority in the universe (which is sort of why Gallifrey existed in the first place — even the Doctor has limits, and answers to someone somewhere) back to being the wanderer who does the right thing because it’s the right thing, and he gave the Doctor a level of innocence back by letting him repair his trauma. And what was clever is that he took a lot of these traits that had come *with* the reboot and the Time War to their apotheosis first, before gently deflating them, rather than retconning them out.
It was necessary to show us a little of the Time War, and the fiftieth was a good way to do that — I also think by showing The Last Great Time War as so mundane in a way, as so similar to real war, it served a bunch of purposes. Not least of which was by being able to show how war is not some grand thing, but terrible, and taking away its mythic dimension. Because myths have too much power. The stuff with the Doctor and Danny Pink was great for that, and about the last time the Doctor tortured himself over it.
It became thematic, talking about how the Doctor had become a thing he didn’t intend, and now had to undo that to reclaim himself.
Because that is *so* bound up in the Time War, we saw a tiny sliver of it with the fall of Arcadia. And the fact it was so guns and ‘splosions was very in keeping with stuff like Genesis of the Daleks, where we see wars that once were maybe about terrifying scale and destruction, but end up getting closer to spears and rocks as they go on without end.
It’s explicit as a throughline from the very start of Smith to the final moments of Capaldi.
The problem is, that was all flushed down the loo subsequently, and both succeeding eras tried to emulate and bring back elements that had been done and dusted. (Chibnall wiped Gallifrey, made the Doctor even more of a godlike being than ever before, and then RTD tried to bring the guilt and pathos back as a foregrounded element whilst simultaneously not quite getting round to doing anything about it or using it for any good purpose.)
We had it in the books for *years* and it did something with the absence of Gallifrey too.
I shall always remember Imperiatrix Romana and the fall of the Nine Gallifreys, and the way the Doctor had to lose a heart and tether himself to Earth at his wedding to function in a universe with no Gallifrey that had ever been.
It's a bit premature to reduce them to two arbitrarily chosen episodes, but you can see it in the episodes they did for Ncuti series 1 that were right next to each other.
The Big Davies episode was about what if you stepped on a shrine and it unleashed a completely unknowable and undefeatable manifestation of something following you for your whole life that you can only defeat by accepting it as a part of you which is explicitly about how you can try to come up with the mechanics to think your way out of something but that's just rules you're making up for yourself to attach meaning to something that has none
And Moffat's big episode was about what if you stepped on a landmine and had to save the day while standing on it which is more about being in an extreme situation and having to think your way out of it with the rules presented to you (to be clear both of these episodes were good. But Boom is good and 73 Yards is a top 5 of all time nuwho for me).
I’m not sure thats what either of those was about, or maybe not the same definition of about.
I sell Boom short by not talking about the anti capitalist message, but I do think there's a difference in a story about working with the mechanics of what's presented and a story about the failure of trying to do that is there at least.
I think when talking about their approach to the Doctor, 73 Yards is a non starter as he’s not really in it.
In terms of their understanding of the show… well, that singular episode is where Davies is working more like Moffat anyway. Vibes. Horror. It was all a dream. Time loop. You can pick a bunch of Moffat episodes that match that.
Moffat and Boom illustrate a Terrance Dicks to Moffat. Sometimes he will just write The Doctor at his most basic form, and leave everything else up to the actor.
Boom was Moffat at his most workmanlike.
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